An alternative I found works well is to use the chat available with gmail. Sure, you can only chat with other gmail account holders or AIM accounts, but it uses port 80 to send and receive everything.

Even better, if you use the secure side of gmail (https://mail.google.com/), then your chat session not only uses port 80, but it is also encrypted. With this, there is no possibility of anyone on your LAN snooping your chats.

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